This is a demonstrable lie. Every rigorous peer reviewed scientific treatment of this topic reveals that the majority of mutations are neutral. Indeed, Susumu Ohno, when providing a proper treatment of the topic during his exposition on neutral drift, provided us with a direct molecular test that can be performed, to determine if a gene had undergone positive selection, purifying selection or drift.
Fatuous analogy. But I’m used to seeing this from creationists.
So is the emergence of the CD32 deletion in the human genome, that protected its inheritors from the bubonic plague in the past, and which in more recent times conferred enhanced resistance to HIV.
Beneficial mutations exist. No amount of dishonest hand-waving by creationists alters this fact.
Sanford is a professional liar for creationism, and wholly untrustworthy on that basis. As for his resurrection of the usual creationist canards about “information”, I’ll deal with that shortly, but there are other matters to attend to first …
No it didn’t. If he had found genuine evidence for his cartoon magic man, he would be guaranteed a Nobel Prize.
That he hasn’t been awarded one for this should be telling you something iimportant.
We’ve seen your idea of “verification” - which is synonymous with “does it conform to my prejudices?”
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
You’ve already demonstrated that you possess a childishly naive view of what constitutes “truth”.
This assertion I shall treat with the suspicion it deserves, given your output here.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!
A mythology that asserts plants were “created” before the Sun existed to power photosynthesis? A mythology that asserts genetics is controlled by coloured sticks?
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!
BOLLOCKS.
I’ve just provided two examples of where science pisses on your sad little goat herder mythology from a great height.
As for moraltiy, I’ve already provided an extensive dissertation on the evolutionary and biological basis of ethics, which you manifestly never even bothered to acknowledge the existence of, and as for archaeology, that discipline pisses on your Christian nationalist pretentions wholesale.
I’ll tell you why shortly. First, let’s deal with the rest of your garbage.
Elegant? It’s a piece of rococo biochemical bureaucracy, as anyone who has actually studied molecular biology will tell you.
Why are entire sections of a gene discarded during the translation process, for example? And why did several versions of the ribosome appear in different organismal lineages, if the first one was “elegant”?
Oh, and I have numerous scientific papers in my collection, documenting the evidence that the genetic code itself is an evolvable entity.
Nothing points to your imaginary cartoon magic man, this is a delusion you entertain.
One, that you’re peddling lies and bullshit, and two, that testable natural processes are sufficient to account for the relevant entities and interactions, as documented in tens of thousands of peer reviewed scientific papers.
Bullshit. Repeately parroting this bullshit doesn’t stop it being bullshit. And I’m about to destroy your bullshit about “information” wholesale, if you exet a little patience.
Bullshit. Every rigorous analysis of the universe and its contents by scientists, has pointed to testable natural processes, not an imaginary cartton magic man from a goat herder mythology.
Was it your childhood ambition to be a mindless Xerox bot for Christian Nationalist lies?
Right, now it’s time to deal with your tiresome resurrection of canards about “information”, which, lo and behold, is Canard #23 in my list of creationist canards. Since I’m now repeating this here specifically for you to read and learn from, so that you cannot claim you were never presented with this, any future resurrection of creationist “information” canards by you, after my posting this, will simply reinforce the view that you’re not interested in honest debate, but in propagandising for your tacky brand of mythology fanboyism, regardless of how much DATA destroys the assertions thereof. Without further ado, I present:
[23] The infamous canards surrounding “information”.
Now this is a particularly insidious brand of canard, because it relies upon the fact that the topic of information, and its rigorous analysis, is replete with misunderstanding. However, instead of seeking to clarify the misconceptions, creationist canards about information perpetuate those misconceptions for duplicitous apologetic purposes. A classic one being the misuse of the extant rigorous treatments of information, and the misapplication of different information treatments to different situations, either through ignorance, or wilful mendacity.
For example, Claude Shannon provided a rigorous treatment of information, but a treatment that was strictly applicable to information transmission, and NOT applicable to information storage. Therefore, application of Shannon information to information storage in the genome is a misuse of Shannon’s work. The correct information analysis to apply to storage is Kolmogorov’s analysis, which erects an entirely different measure of information content that is intended strictly to be applicable to storage. Mixing and matching the two is a familiar bait-and-switch operation that propagandists for creationist doctrine are fond of.
However, the ultimate reason why creationist canards about information are canards, is simply this. Information is NOT a magic entity. It doesn’t require magic to produce it. Ultimately, “information” is nothing more than the observational data that is extant about the current state of a system. That is IT. No magic needed. All that happens, in real world physical systems, is that different system states lead to different outcomes when the interactions within the system take place. Turing alighted upon this notion when he wrote his landmark paper on computable numbers, and used the resulting theory to establish that Hilbert’s conjecture upon decidability in formal axiomatic systems was false.
Of course, it’s far easier to visualise the process at work, when one has an entity such as a Turing machine to analyse this - a Turing machine has precise, well-defined states, and precise, well-defined interactions that take place when the machine occupies a given state. But this is precisely what we have with DNA - a system that can exist in a number of well-defined states, whose states determine the nature of the interactions that occur during translation, and which result in different outcomes for different states. indeed, the DNA molecule plays a passive role in this: its function is simply to store the sequence of states that will result, ultimately, in the synthesis of a given protein, and is akin to the tape running through a Turing machine.
The real hard work is actually performed by the ribosomes, which take that state data and use it to bolt together amino acids into chains to form proteins, which can be thought of as individual biological ‘Turing machines’ whose job is to perform, mechanically and mindlessly in accordance with the electrostatic and chemical interactions permitting this, the construction of a protein using the information arising from DNA as the template. Anyone who thinks magic is needed in all of this, once again, is in need of an education.
As for the canard that “mutations cannot produce new information”, this is manifestly false. Not only does the above analysis explicitly permit this, the production of new information (in the form of new states occupied by DNA molecules) has been observed taking place in the real world and documented in the relevant scientific literature. If you can’t be bothered reading any of this voluminous array of scientific papers, and understanding the contents thereof, before erecting this particularly moronic canard, then don’t bother erecting the canard in the first place, because it will simply demonstrate that you are scientifically ignorant. Indeed, the extant literature not only covers scientific papers explicitly dealing with information content in the genome, such as Thomas D. Schneider’s paper handily entitled Evolution And Biological Information to make your life that bit easier, but also papers on de novo gene origination, of which there are a good number, several of which I have presented in the past in various places. The mere existence of these scientific papers, and the data that they document, blows tiresome canards about “information” out of the water with a nuclear depth charge. Post information canards at your peril after reading this.
Whilst dwelling on information, another creationist canard also needs to be dealt with here, namely the false conflation of information with ascribed meaning. Which can be demonstrated to be entirely false by reference to the following sequence of hexadecimal bytes in a computer’s memory:
81 16 00 2A FF 00
To a computer with an 8086 processor, those bytes correspond to the following single machine language instruction:
ADC [2A00H], 00FFH
To a computer with a 6502 processor, those bytes correspond to the following machine language instruction sequence:
CLC
ASL ($00,X)
LDX #$FF
BRK
To a computer with a 6809 processor, those bytes correspond to the following machine language instruction sequence:
CMPA #$16
NEG $2AFF
NEG ??
the ?? denoting the fact that for this processor, the byte sequence is incomplete, and two more bytes are needed to supply the address operand for the NEG instruction.
Now, we have three different ascribed meanings to one stream of bytes. Yet, none of these ascribed meanings influences either the Shannon information content, when that stream is transmitted from one computer to another, or the Kolmogorov information content when those bytes are stored in memory. Ascribed meaning is irrelevant to both rigorous information measures. As is to be expected, when one regards information content simply as observational data about the state of the system (in this case, the values of the stored bytes in memory). Indeed, it is entirely possible to regard ascribed meaning as nothing other than the particular interactions driven by the underlying data, once that data is being processed, which of course will differ from processor to processor.
Which means that under such an analysis, even ascribed meaning, which creationists fallaciously conflate with information content, also requires no magical input. All that is required is the existence of a set of interactions that will produce different outcomes from the different observed states of the system (with the term ‘observation’ being used here sensu lato to mean any interaction that is capable of differentiating between the states of the system of interest).
For that matter, just to illustrate how fatuous creationist assertions about “information” are, a dog turd is a source of information. Chemical analysis of said dog turd will reveal what the dog ate the previous day, if we operate on the basis that it takes 24 hours for food to pass through the dog’s digestive tract. Indeed, the timescale involved here is irrelevant - the principle that chemical analysis of the dog turd reveals the nature of the dog’s previous meal is the same, whether it takes 12 hours, 24 hours or 48 hours for the dog’s first mouthfuls of food to be converted into an extruded turd. In addition, detection of an excess of such molecules as bile metabolites in the dog turd, will tell a veterinarian that the dog is suffering from some sort of liver disease.
Likewise, by spreading small samples from the dog turd onto some agar plates, we can determine the bacterial serotypes that make up the gut flora of the dog in question. We can also determine whether or not the dog is suffering from a bacterial infection of the gastrointestinal tract, and the bacterial serotype responsible for this. A histological analysis of the dog turd will reveal whether or not the dog is carrying parasitic worms in the digestive tract (and which species), and if we want to be really vigorous in our pursuit of pathogens, we can use serum antibodies or DNA oligos to match with a whole range of pathogens, ranging from protists to viruses.
A dog turd is a goldmine of information for both chemists and biologists in this respect, and the idea that we need a cartoon magic man to “insert” information into the dog turd is farcical. Yet, creationists assert precisely this with respect to DNA.
So, can we see an end to creationsit bullshit about information once and for all, especially from you?